Revelation helped Sainnawap butt out

Darryl Sainnawap smoked all through his teens.
“I started smoking when I was 12,” said Sainnawap, a councillor in Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug, during the Tobacco Talk youth gathering in Thunder Bay Jan. 28-30. “It was a curiosity. It was everywhere in my community. When you see people you look up to doing it, you want to be like them; look like them.”
Through his teens he continued to smoke, despite knowing what it could do to his body.
“I definitely regret doing it now,” he said. “I remember being at a track meet and thinking that if I won my race, I would quality for another meet in Toronto. I didn’t win and I think the fact that I was a smoker prevented me from being as good as I could have been.”
Sainnawap was also a member of the Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School city volleyball championship.
“Knowing what I know now about cigarettes and smoking, I never would have started,” Sainnawap said.
About five years ago, he decided he needed to quit.
“I was sitting on a doorstep having my first cigarette of the day,” he said. “I had this bad affect (buzz) from the cigarette and I had this memory flash into my head.”
As a child, he recalled scolding his aunts about smoking.
“I told them it was a bad habit and they needed to quit,” he said. “I told them if I was ever addicted, I would quit with no problems.
“Sitting there, that day on the doorstep, I knew how they felt with that addiction controlling them. I had the confidence as a nine-year-old to tell them yet I had let myself become addicted. That memory brought my willpower back and I quit.”